How I Try To Kill Houseplants

Some people have “green thumbs” — mine are black. But they’re getting better.

I like to have plants on our front porch – it makes the place look welcoming and homey!

So I periodically go buy some flowers and plants, water them religiously, and it looks great!

A month or so later it looks like this, no matter how religiously I water and feed and care for them.

The most tortured example of this “skill” of mine is a poor philodendron that I have tried to kill repeatedly, only to nurse it back to health at the last second, only to then neglect it to the point of near death again so that the cycle can continue. A houseplant web site (Dave’s Garden) says about philodendrons, “The easiest plant to grow, you can almost point and the plant will start to grow for you! The heart shaped leaves can take a lot of abuse and are not fussy at all.” Obviously Dave hasn’t ever met me.

After about a dozen cycles through the “almost dead” to “feeling better” to “almost dead” pattern, about a year ago this poor, abused plant (which you can see in one of its healthier phases at the far right of the first picture above) was down to one single leaf on one single vine.

Here you can see it on the down side of a cycle, but still with at least a couple of leaves. It went downhill from here. Nonetheless, at that point I again jumped on the Good Gardener bandwagon and started nursing it back to health.

Here it is today, not quite thriving, but again on the way back with at least one foot (or vine) in the land of the living.

This is why I think that the universe is filled with life in every bizarre niche, nook, and cranny possible. If this stubborn little plant can survive all of the neglect and abuse that I inflict on it, just think what we might find under some semi-moist rock on Mars, floating in an ocean under the ice on Callisto, or even swimming in a pool of complex hydrocarbons on Europa!